Soap bars have been used to wash the human body and for "doing laundry" for some time. Before the advent of the washing machine which dictated the employment of materials as powder, disintergratable brickets or liquid forms; laundry was washed with laundry soap bars made from suitable soaps of higher fatty acids such as sodium soaps of mixed tallow and rosin fatty acids. Laundry soap bars were especially suitable for being rubbed on the badly stained soiled portion of fabrics being laundered, as on a wash board, to deposit a high concentration of the soap on the soiled area.
Despite the fact that after introduction of synthetic or organic detergents and washing machines the amount of soap employed for laundry use diminished greatly, with soap based laundry bar being replaced mostly by synthetic or organic detergent compositions in powder, liquid or other suitable form, laundry soaps and detergents in bar form are still preferred by some customers especially in certain areas of the world. Several detergent laundry bars based on alkyl benzene sulfonate detergents have been successfully marketed. They have been characterized as the equivalence in detersive action of powdered laundry detergent based on alkyl benzene sulfonates and are considered by many consumers to be more convenient to use.
Although several detergent compositions for use of high surface area cleanser products contain pine oil, the use of pine oil and its derivatives in a laundry detergent bar has not been known.
Surprisingly it had been discovered that it is possible to make a synthetic detergent cleansing article having improved stain removal and antibacterial properties which has overall excellent cleansing performance and physical characteristics, by incorporating pine oil or pine oil derivatives into the composition. It has been discovered that the order in which the pine oil is incorporated into the composition is very important to produce a synthetic detergent bar having suitable hardness, texture and improved stain removing and antibacterial properties.
The use of the mixture of pine oil and ammonia in detergent composition is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,703,472. U.S. Pat. No. 4,705,644 discloses detergent laundry bars that are mild to the hands of the user have good foaming properties in hand washing and good processing characteristics U.S. Pat. No. 4,219,535 discloses the use of zeolite A as a detergent builder. U.S. Pat. No. 4,543,204 discloses synthetic detergent cleansing articles based on sodium fatty alcohol sulfate. The patent also discloses the use of builders that may be used to replace phosphate.